The great May Day strike of the proletariat of all Russia
and the accompanying street demonstrations, revolutionary leaflets, and
revolutionary speeches before gatherings of workers have clearly shown that
Russia has entered a period of revolutionary upswing.

This upswing did not come as a bolt from the blue. The way had been
paved for it over a long period by all the conditions of Russian life, and
the mass strikes over the Lena shootings and the May Day strikes merely
marked its actual arrival. The temporary triumph of the counter-revolution
was inseparably bound up with a decline in the mass struggle of the
workers. The number of strikers gives an approximate yet absolutely
objective and precise idea of the extent of the struggle.

During the ten years preceding the revolution, from 1895 to 1904, the
average number of strikers was 43,000 a year (in round figures). In 1905
there were 2,750,000 strikers, in 1906—1,000,000, and in
1907—750,000. The three years of the revolution were distinguished by a
rise in the strike movement of the proletariat unprecedented anywhere
in the world. Its decline, which began in 1906–07, became definite in
1908, when there were 175,000 strikers. The coup d’état of June 3,
1907, which restored the autocratic rule of the tsar in alliance with the
Duma of the Black-Hundred landlords and the commercial and industrial
magnates, was an inevitable result of the flagging of the revolutionary
energy of the masses.

The three years 19080-10 were a period of Black-Hundred
counter-revolution at its worst, of liberal-bourgeois renegacy and of
proletarian despondency and disintegration.
The number of strikers steadily dropped, reaching 60,000 in 1909 and 50,000
in 1910.

However, a noticeable change set in at the end of 1910. The
demonstrations in connection with the death of the liberal Muromtsev, and
of Leo Tolstoy, and also the student movement, clearly indicated that a
fresh breeze had begun to blow, that the mood of the democratic masses had
reached a turning-point. The year 1911 saw the workers gradually going over
to an offensive—the number of strikers rose to 100,000. Signs
from various quarters indicate that the weariness and stupor brought about
by the triumph of the counter-revolution are passing away, that once again
there is an urge for revolution. In summing up the situation, the
All-Russia Conference, held in January 1912, noted that “the onset of a
political revival is to be noted among broad democratic circles, chiefly
among the proletariat. The workers’ strikes in 1910–11, the beginning of
demonstrations and proletarian meetings, the start of a movement among
urban bourgeois democrats (the student strikes), etc., are all indications
of the growing revolutionary feelings of the masses against the June Third
regime”. (See the “Notification” of the Conference,
p. 18.[1]
)

By the second quarter of this year these sentiments had become so
strong that they manifested themselves in actions by the masses, and
brought about a revolutionary upswing. The course of events during
the past eighteen months shows with perfect clarity that there is nothing
accidental in this upswing, that it has come quite naturally and was made
inevitable by the whole development of Russia in the previous period.

The Lena shootings led to the revolutionary temper of the masses
developing into a revolutionary upswing of the masses. Nothing could be
more false than the liberal invention, which Trotsky repeats in the Vienna
Pravda after the liquidators, that “the struggle for freedom of
association is the basis of both the Lena tragedy and the powerful
response to it in the country”. Freedom of association was neither the
specific nor the principal demand in the Lena strike. It was not lack of
the freedom of association that the Lena
shootings revealed, but lack of freedom from provocation, lack of rights in
general, lack of freedom from wholesale tyranny.

The Lena shootings, as we have already made clear in
Sotsial-Demokrat[3] No. 26, were an exact reflection of the
entire regime of the June Third monarchy. It was not at all the
struggle for one of the rights of the proletariat, even the most
fundamental, the most important of them, that was characteristic of the
Lena events. What was characteristic of those events was the complete
absence of any kind of elementary legality. The characteristic
feature was that an agent provocateur, a spy, a secret police
agent, a menial of the tsar, resorted to mass shootings without any
political reason whatever. It is this general lack of rights typical of
Russian life, this hopelessness and impossibility of fighting for
particular rights, and this incorrigibility of the tsarist
monarchy and of its entire regime, that stood out so distinctly against the
background of the Lena events as to fire the masses with
revolutionary ardour.

The liberals have been straining every nerve to represent the Lena events and
the May Day strikes as a trade union movement and a struggle for
“rights”. But anyone who is not blinded by liberal (and
liquidationist) controversies will see in them something different. He will see
the revolutionary character of the mass strike, which is especially
emphasised by the St. Petersburg May Day leaflet of various Social-Democratic
groups (and even of one group of worker Socialist-Revolutionaries!), which we
reprint in full in our news
section,[4] and which repeats the slogans advanced by the All-Russia
Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. in January 1912.

And then, it is not really slogans that are the main proof of the
revolutionary character of the Lena and May Day strikes. The slogans
formulated what the facts showed. The mass strikes spreading from
district to district, their tremendous growth, the speed with which they
spread, the courage of the workers, the increased number of mass meetings
and revolutionary speeches, the demand that the fines imposed for
celebrating May Day be cancelled, and the combination of the political and
the economic strike, familiar to us from the time of the first Russian
revolution, are all
obvious indications of the true nature of the movement, which is a
revolutionary upswing of the masses.

Let us recall the experience of 1905. Events show that the
tradition of the revolutionary mass strike lives on among
the workers and that the workers at once took up and revived this
tradition. The strike wave of 1905, unprecedented in the world, involved
810,000 strikers during the first, and 1,277,000 during the last quarter of
the year, being a combination of the political and the economic
strike. According to tentative estimates, the strikes over the Lena events
involved about 300,000 workers and the May Day strikes about 400,000, and
the strike movement continues to grow. Every day the newspapers, even the
liberal ones, bring news of how the wildfire of strikes is spreading. The
second quarter of 1912 is not quite over, and yet it is already becoming
quite obvious that, as regards the size of the strike movement, the
beginning of the revolutionary upswing in 1912 is not lower, but rather
higher than the beginning in 1905!

The Russian revolution was the first to develop on a large scale this
proletarian method of agitation, of rousing and uniting the masses and of
drawing them into the struggle. Now the proletariat is applying this method
once again and with an even firmer hand. No power on earth could achieve
what the revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat is achieving by this
method. A huge country, with a population of 150,000,000 spread over a vast
area, scattered, oppressed, deprived of all rights, ignorant, fenced off
from “evil influences” by a swarm of authorities, police, spies—the
whole of this country is getting into a ferment. The most backward
sections both of the workers and the peasants are coming into direct or
indirect contact with the strikers. Hundreds of thousands of revolutionary
agitators are all at once appearing on the scene. Their influence is
infinitely increased by the fact that they are inseparably linked with the
rank and file, with the masses, and that they remain among them, fight for
the most urgent needs of every worker’s family, and combine with
this immediate struggle for urgent economic needs their political protest
and struggle against the monarchy. For counter-revolution has stirred up in
millions and tens of millions of people a bitter hatred for the monarchy,
it has given them the, rudiments of an understanding
of the part played by it, and now the slogan of the foremost workers of the
capital—long live the democratic republic!—spreads through thousands of
channels, in the wake of every strike, reaching the backward sections, the
remotest provinces, the “people”, the “depths of Russia”!

Very characteristic are the comments made on strikes by Severyanin, a
liberal, which were welcomed by Russkiye Vedomosti and
sympathetically reprinted by Rech:

“Have the workers any grounds for admixing economic or
any [!] demands to a May Day strike?” asks Mr. Severyanin; and he answers:
“I make bold to think that they have none. Every economic strike can and
should be begun only after a serious weighing of its chances of
success.... That is why, more often than not, it is unreason able to link
such strikes with May Day.... Indeed, it would be rather strange to do so:
we are celebrating the international workers’ holiday, and we use the
occasion to demand a ten per cent rise for calico of such-and-such
grades.”

That is how the liberal reasons! And this piece of infinite vulgarity,
meanness and nastiness is sympathetically accept ed by the “best” liberal
papers, which claim to be democratic!

The crudest self-interest of a bourgeois, the vilest coward ice of a
counter-revolutionary—that is what lies behind the florid phrases of the
liberal. He wants the pockets of the employers to be safe. He wants an
“orderly” and “harmless” demonstration in favour of “freedom of
association”! But the proletariat, instead of this, is drawing the masses
into a revolutionary strike, which indissolubly links politics
with economics, a strike which wins the support of the most backward
sections by the success of the struggle for an immediate improvement in the
life of the workers, and at the same time rouses the people against the
tsarist monarchy.

Yes, the experience of 1905 created a deep-rooted and great tradition
of mass strikes. And we must not forget the results that these strikes
produce in Russia. Stubborn mass strikes are inseparably bound up in our
country with armed uprising.

Let these words not be misinterpreted. It is by no means a question of
a call for an uprising. Such a call would be most unwise at the
present moment. It is a question of establishing the connection
between strike and uprising in Russia.

How did the uprising grow in 1905? Firstly, mass strikes,
demonstrations and meetings made clashes between the people and the police
and troops more and more frequent. Secondly, the mass strikes roused the
peasantry to a number of partial, fragmentary, semi-spontaneous
revolts. Thirdly, the mass strikes very soon spread to the Army and Navy,
causing clashes on economic grounds (the “bean” and similar
“mutinies”), and subsequently insurrections. Fourthly, the
counter-revolution itself started civil war by pogroms, by
Violence against democrats, and so on.

The revolution of 1905 was defeated not because it had gone “too
far”, or because the December
uprising[5] was “artificial”, as renegades among the liberals, and
their like imagine. On the contrary, the cause of the defeat was that the
uprising did not go far enough, that the realisation of
its necessity was not sufficiently widespread and firmly assimilated among
the revolutionary classes, that the up rising was not concerted, resolute,
organised, simultaneous, aggressive.

Let us see now whether signs of a gathering revolt are in
evidence at present. In order not to be carried away by revolutionary
enthusiasm, let us take the testimony of the Octobrists. The
German Union of Octobrists in St. Petersburg consists mainly of so-called
“Left” and “constitutional” Octobrists, who are particularly popular
among the Cadets, and who are most capable (in comparison with the other
Octobrists and Cadets) of observing events “objectively”, without making
it their aim to frighten the authorities with the prospect of revolution.

Here is what the St. Petersburger Zeitung, the newspaper of
these Octobrists, wrote in its weekly political review on May 6 (19):

“May has come. Regardless of the weather, this is
usually not a very pleasant month for the inhabitants of the capital,
because it begins with the proletarian ‘holiday’. This
year, with the impression of the Lena demonstrations still fresh in the
minds of the workers, May Day was particularly dangerous. The atmosphere of
the capital, saturated with all sorts of rumours about strikes and
demonstrations, portended a fire. Our loyal police were visibly agitated;
they organised searches, arrested some persons and mobilised large forces
to prevent street demonstrations. The fact that the police could think of
nothing more clever than to raid the editorial offices of the workers’
papers
and arrest their editors does not testify to a particularly intimate
knowledge of the wires by which the puppet regiments of the workers were
pulled. Yet such wires exist. This is evident from the disciplined
character of the strike and from many other circumstances. That is why this
May Day strike, the largest we have witnessed so far, was so
ominous—there were some 100,000 or perhaps even 150,000 workers of big
and small workshops on strike. It was only a peaceful parade, but the solid
unity of that army was remarkable, all the more because the recent unrest
among the workers was accompanied by other alarming facts. On various naval
vessels, sailors were arrested for conducting revolutionary
propaganda. Judging by all the information that has got into the press, the
situation is not very good on our naval vessels, which are not numerous as
it is.... The railwaymen are also giving cause for anxiety. True,
matters nowhere went so far as an attempt to call a strike, but arrests,
including such a conspicuous one as that of A. A. Ushakov, an assistant
station master on the Nikolayevskaya Railway, show that there is a certain
danger there as well.

“Attempts at revolution on the part of immature worker
masses can, of course, have only a harmful effect on the outcome of the
Duma elections. These attempts are all the more unreasonable because the
Tsar has appointed Manukhin, and the Council of State has passed the
workers’ Insurance Bill”!!

That is how a German Octobrist reasons. We, on our part, must remark
that we have received exact first-hand information about the sailors which
proves that Novoye Vremya has exaggerated and inflated the
matter. The
Okhrana[6] is obviously “working” in agent provocateur
fashion. Premature attempts at an uprising would be extremely unwise. The
working-class vanguard must understand that the sup port of the working
class by the democratic peasantry and the active participation of the armed
forces are the main conditions for a timely, i.e., successful, armed
uprising in Russia.

Mass strikes in revolutionary epochs have their objective logic. They
scatter hundreds of thousands and millions of sparks in all
directions—and all around there is the inflammable material of extreme
bitterness, the torture of unprecedented starvation, endless tyranny,
shameless and cynical mockery at the “pauper”, the “muzhik”, the
rank-and-file soldier. Add to this the perfectly unbridled, pogromist
Jew-baiting carried on by the Black Hundreds and stealthily fostered and
directed by the Court gang of the dull witted and bloodthirsty Nicholas
Romanov. “So it was, so it will
be”[7]—these revealing words were uttered by the
Minister Makarov, to his own misfortune, and to the misfortune of his class
and his landlord tsar!

The revolutionary upswing of the masses imposes great and responsible
duties on every working-class Social-Democrat, on every honest
democrat. “All-round support for the movement of the masses that is
beginning [we should say already: the revolutionary movement of
the masses that has begun], and its expansion on the basis of full
implementation of the Party slogans”—this is how the All-Russia
Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. defined these duties. The Party slogans—a
democratic republic, an eight-hour day, confiscation of all the landed
estates—must become the slogans of all democrats, of the
people’s revolution.

To be able to support and extend the movement of the masses, we need
organisation and more organisation. Without an illegal party we
cannot carry on this work, and there is no point in just talking about
it. In supporting and extending the onslaught of the masses, we must
carefully take into account the experience of 1905, and in explaining the
need for and inevitability of an uprising, we must warn against and keep
off premature attempts. The growth of mass strikes, the enlistment
of other classes in the struggle, the state of the organisations, and the
temper of the masses will all suggest of themselves the moment when all
forces must unite in a concerted, resolute, aggressive, supremely
courageous onslaught of the revolution on the tsarist monarchy.

Notes

[2]The article “The Revolutionary Upswing” was published early in
June 1912, after Lenin had made, at. a meeting of the Paris section of the
R.S.D.L.P. Organisation Abroad, a report on developments in Russia
(April 26 [May 9], 1912) and read a paper entitled “The Revolutionary
Upswing of the Russian Proletariat” (May 31 [June 13]). A printed notice
issued by the Paris section of the R.S.D.L.P. Organisation Abroad gave a
detailed outline of the paper coinciding with the main propositions of this
article.

[3]Sotsial-Demokrat (The Social-Democrat)—the Central
Organ of the R.S.D.L.P., published illegally from February 1908 to
January 1917. In all 58 issues appeared. The first issue appeared in
Russia,
and then publication was transferred, first to Paris and afterwards to
Geneva. By decision of the Central Committee of the R.S.D.L.P., the
Editorial Board consisted of representatives of the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks
and Polish Social-Democrats.

Sotsial-Demokrat published more than eighty articles and other
items by Lenin. On its Editorial Board Lenin upheld a consistently
Bolshevik line. Two members of the Board—Kamenev and Zinovyev—took a
conciliatory view of the liquidators and tried to defeat Lenin’s
line. Another two members, the Mensheviks Martov and Dan, obstructed the
work of the Board and at the same time openly defended liquidationism in
Golos Sotsial-Demokrata.

Lenin’s uncompromising struggle against the liquidators resulted in
Martov and Dan resigning from the Editorial Board in June 1911. From
December 1911 the newspaper was edited by Lenin.

[4]The leaflet mentioned by Lenin was printed in St. Petersburg and
circulated at the factories before May 1, 1912. It called on the workers to
hold meetings and demonstrations in Nevsky Prospekt on May Day, under the
slogans put forward by the Sixth (Prague) All-Russia Conference of the
R.S.D.L.P.: “A constituent assembly, an eight-hour working day, and
confiscation of the landed estates.” The leaflet ended with the militant
appeals: “Down with the tsar’s government! Down with the autocratic
Constitution of June 3! Long live a democratic republic! Long live
socialism!”
It was signed: “Meeting of Representatives of All Organised Workers of
St. Petersburg”, “Social-Democratic ‘Unity’ Group”, “City Central
Social-Democratic Group”, “Group of Worker Socialist-Revolutionaries”,
“Group of Worker Social-Democrats of St. Petersburg”, and
“Representatives of May Day Committees”.

On June 4 (17), 1912, the full text of the leaflet was published in the
news section of Sotsial-Demokrat No. 27.

[5]The December uprising was the armed uprising of the Moscow
workers against the autocracy in December 1905. For nine days the workers,
led by the Moscow Bolshevik Social-Democrats, fought gallantly on the
barricades against the tsar’s troops. The government did not succeed in
crushing the revolt until fresh troop. arrived from St. Petersburg. It
dealt with the insurgents with monstrous cruelty; the workers’ districts
ran with blood, and thou sands of workers were killed in Moscow and the
vicinity.

[6]TheOkhrana was an agency of the secret police in tsarist
Russia, in charge of political investigation. It was under the jurisdiction
of the Police Department.